


This Bitter Earth

by CloudAtlas



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Angst, Biblical References, Community: be_compromised, F/M, Jonah and the Whale, Starvation, background character death(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-03
Updated: 2014-07-03
Packaged: 2018-02-03 08:07:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1737428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CloudAtlas/pseuds/CloudAtlas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The only beautiful things here are her and the stars. And he can’t reach the stars.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>It's the end of the world, or the end of <i>their</i> world. There are Biblical references, and lots of dust. It's not all that happy, really.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Bitter Earth

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Nature Of Dust](https://archiveofourown.org/works/631950) by [inkvoices](https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkvoices/pseuds/inkvoices). 



> Time goes by and they’re rattling along another narrow highway to another tired town when Clint starts to see unnatural but familiar formations at the side of the road. It’s farm equipment, rearing up out of the ground where it’s been buried under loose topsoil and dust, made recognizable by the parts that are exposed. Wheels. The end of a plough.
> 
> “Places like this,” says Natasha softly, “they’re like a shipwreck I was – that I saw once. It looks all the sadder, being so far from the sea.”

**וַיְהִי מִקֵּץ יָמִים, וַיִּיבַשׁ הַנָּחַל: כִּי לֹא-הָיָה גֶשֶׁם, בָּאָרֶץ**

And it came to pass after a while, that the brook dried up, because there was no rain in the land.

_1 Kings 17:7_

 

“Do you ever imagine we live in the ribcage of a dead animal?”

Natasha is sitting in the stern, head angled so she can see the stars through the broken frame. She gets like this sometimes; random questions Clint doesn’t understand or know how to answer. Not that he thinks Natasha is looking for answers so much as wanting a sounding board to bounce her thoughts off, to remind her that she’s not alone.

“No,” he says shortly, turning the rat over the fire.

“I have,” she replies vaguely. She reaches up to trace the rotten edges of the boat’s frame. “Like Jonah and the Whale.”

Clint doesn’t understand her, not really.

“What’s that?”

Natasha glances across at him before returning her gaze to the stars. “Jonah and the Whale?”

“Yeah.”

She shrugs slightly. “Just a story.”

Clint doesn’t say anything in return. Natasha knows more stories that anyone Clint has ever met; stories from other places, stories from other times, stories from _before_. Clint wonders about this story – this Jonah, and the whale he apparently lived in – and wonders which category it falls into.

Or maybe Jonah isn’t anything. Maybe Natasha made him up to make Clint feel dumb. She does that sometimes.

At least this time Clint knows what a whale is.

“Just…” she says after a while, and Clint’s head snaps up, eyes finding her immediately – like always, “Look.”

She points at the keel.

“Spine,” she says.

She points to the frame; “Ribs.”

The sheets they use to block out the wind, sun and the worst of the dust gets, “Skin,” and Tony’s jury-rigged water-works gets, “Guts, failing.”

Her eyes are sad, and she skips the prow, like not looking at it makes it not there, but her gaze is dragged back anyway; drawn inexorably like buzzards to the dead. And because now she’s acknowledged it Clint can too – his eyes finally settling on the new pile of dust and loose earth. The pile that will only last until the next storm, when it’ll become just any other piece of sun blasted ground but for the stone marker standing like an accusing finger pointing at the sky that let it down.

Two days ago there were four; Steve first, dust causing him to cough up blood until he had no more blood to give, then Bobbi, starving despite how hard they tried. Pepper; sunstroke and dehydration, and finally Sam. Scorpion.

Now there are five – an entire hand clawing desperately, trying to dig itself out of the dry earth and into the unkind world, as if salvation lies above, when anyone with any sense knows the sky is no salvation; that salvation is as likely as rain.

The thumb – Tony. Hot metal through the heart because “that last tanker has to have _something_ salvageable”.

“Teeth,” Natasha says quietly in their direction – their friends who are probably better off where they are – and Clint thinks of all the angry, hungry ghosts this land now houses. The dead and the people who haven’t yet worked out that they’re dead.

“What happened to Jonah?” Clint suddenly asks, because it’s important, _so fucking important_. Because he needs to know they can be saved.

“God saved him,” Natasha says, “I think.”

“God?” Clint doesn’t know God.

“Rain,” says Natasha.

Clint knows they’re doomed then.

He looks over at her. She’s skeletal thin, just as he is, and red all over. Hair dull red, skin shiny red and peeling, eyes red from the dust and clothes red from the dust and blood red red _red_ and Clint can almost see how it would gush. Almost wants it to just because it would be wet on his tongue.

Clint hasn’t seen more than a drop of water for days.

He looks out over the red rock and red dry earth before looking up at the wind-and-dust blasted structure they call home. Tony said it was a boat and told them the names of the parts, because that was the stuff Tony knew. He said they were all boats and Natasha agreed, so it must be true. They floated on water once, but Clint can’t imagine enough water to make their little boat float, and definitely not enough to make the tanker that killed Tony float. Clint only knows what that much water looks like because of the mirages.

Clint knows water from licking it from rocks. And from tears.

Soon they won’t have any at all, anyway. Only Tony really knew how to fix his contraption.

Clint is so hungry his stomach is in knots. But he’s used to that, so he makes sure the rat is cooked through before taking the hot meat and tearing it in two; half for him and half for her. It’ll stave off death for another day, though Clint wonders why they bother.

The only thing beautiful here is the stars; cold and unattainable.

And her.

“If you could go back,” he says quietly, after a while. “If you could go back and find the one who could have stopped this from happening, what would you say to them?”

Because Clint can ask questions with no proper answers too, even if he’s not sure that a person, or people, could have created this land they call home.

She’s leaning against the frame and looking at the stars again. The only two beautiful things in the world staring back at each other. Clint would move closer to her, but everything hurts too much as it is.

How can he be in love when the world is ending?

After a while, Natasha speaks.

“I’d say, ‘In the future, children live in whales. But the whales are dead and the seas are dead and the children will soon be dead because you cannot eat dust any more than you can eat the money you are so worried about’.”

And Clint wonders again at this story, this land. If _people_ could really have created the world he lives in; if people could have created it _knowing_ what they were doing. If they could have created it and not cared that at the end of the world a dying boy would fall in love with a dying girl and only the stars would be their witness.

He wonders if the world has always been this cruel, or if cruelty, like dust, increases over time.

“I’d say, ‘try dying of thirst before you decide if the world is worth saving’.”

Clint can’t swallow because his mouth is too dry. He wants to cry but he has no water to spare.

“I’d say,” and Natasha is so quiet now, and Clint can hear the tears that can never now fall. “I’d say, ‘please can I have some water?’”

Clint moves then, because the only beautiful things here are her and the stars. And he can’t reach the stars.

She feels like wood splinters under his hands, bones pressing against skin so thin he can see through it. They’re all angles that don’t fit and it hurts. Clint feels like he’s going to throw up, both because she’s so close and because the rat was the first thing he’s eaten in days. His body doesn’t know what to do with food anymore.

Her breath is hot against his collar. Her breath is hot and her skin is hot and the air is hot and there is no escape from the heat. They will die here, curled together with not enough meat between them to tempt even the buzzards. Sucked dry by the heat and the dust and the merciless sky.

“I don’t want to die,” Natasha says. Not frightened, just matter-of-fact. No one wants to die, not really. They want the choice. Clint and Natasha don’t have the choice.

“I love you,” Clint says.

He doesn’t have a choice.

 

[this bitter earth, well what fruit it bares](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmBMls_Sxas)

and if my life is like the dust, that hides the glow of a rose, what good am I?

heaven only knows

**Author's Note:**

> I can't honestly say where this came from, because I have no idea how I jumped from The Nature of Dust to this. I don't know what I was doing or thinking to arrive at this but... I just saw "shipwrecks" in the context of sand and... Have you ever seen photos of [the ships stranded on the skeleton coast of Namibia](https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=stranded+ships+aral+sea&client=firefox-a&hs=YVe&sa=X&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&channel=sb&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&ei=tE-OU97jNMGGOPjcgOAD&ved=0CCUQsAQ&biw=1366&bih=641#channel=sb&q=stranded+ships+skeleton+coast+aerial+&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&tbm=isch)? Or [left behind by the draining of the Aral Sea](https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=stranded+ships+aral+sea&client=firefox-a&hs=YVe&sa=X&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&channel=sb&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&ei=tE-OU97jNMGGOPjcgOAD&ved=0CCUQsAQ&biw=1366&bih=641)? (And that shit is scary: Look at maps of how the Aral Sea used to look, and what it looks like now. _It's refered to in the past tense now_. The year I was born (1989) it was one of the four largest lakes in the world and now it is talked about in the past tense.)
> 
> I thought of that. That and the elephant graveyard in the Lion King, and Zero from Holes hinding under the wooden boat and eating peaches, and how, for the fifth time, the IPCC has brought out a report saying that climate change is _real_ and _happening_ , and I haven't heard anything saying that it's made a blind bit of difference. ([IPCC AR5 Summary for Policymakers](http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/report/WG1AR5_SPM_FINAL.pdf) because if I'm going to harp on about this you may as well get a link to the facts.)
> 
> Bible quote and Hebrew from [A Hebrew - English Bible: 1 Kings 17](http://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt09a17.htm). Beta'd by my friend Jenna.


End file.
